Simultaneously, respecting and acknowledging relationships with existing customers is also key. The lines have rapidly blurred between acquisition and retention strategies, meaning the decision of reach versus relevance is no longer binary. It is a question of both.
Getting insights into the end customer is a challenge for a number of reasons, especially as marketers are not always sure what type of information is most important or how to capture and most effectively analyse what they need.
This whole debate between reach and relevance is crucial to generating the right customer experience, and brands that haven't figured this out are potentially alienating some of their best customers.
One way to work is to focus your marketing efforts on creating content that taps into people's needs and desires, rather than mass marketing messages that may reach a lot of people but are not necessarily relevant to most of them.
Relationships can be built over time with consumers by using customer data to create a targeted CRM strategy to communicate with people at the right time. After all, when it comes to marketing your business, it's all about defining and recognising your target.
While there are many brands targeting very specific groups of people, building quality audiences that are broad enough to reach more people, at a lower cost, and deliver measurable sales impact, there are equally as many brands with niche audiences that are experimenting with a concept known as broad segmentation.
This involves deploying more personalised messaging and tailored media strategies against key customer segments within the broader group. To be sure, more precise targeting will always be hugely valuable for marketers and brands engaging in direct-response advertising. When you can reach three times the users at three times the cost efficiency, you can achieve real business impact.
Identity resolution lets brands know who they're marketing to and when they're marketing to them. It allows brands to collect and analyse data that's scattered across devices, offline databases and third-party databases, so they can identify their customers across every channel.
The more data sources available and the more reliable the data is, the more certain and rounded the view of the customer will be. A company-wide customer identity resolution can serve as the connective tissue that brands need to integrate their customer data and orchestrate the entire customer experience. If you resolve and manage this right, it will allow you to understand a tremendous amount about customers at specific moments in time.
While reach might edge relevance when it comes to spreading a message far and wide, striking a balance between the two is key.
Marketers don't need to choose between the two any longer - they can have their 'mass reach' cake and eat it too, just by tailoring messages to be more relevant to different segments of their audience. Using reach and targeting in tandem will enable you to pinpoint new targets as well as established customers, maximising sales and return on investment.